My big plan for free comic book day was to hit all four of
the stores in the Syracuse
area to get a fairly complete sample of free comics to pick through and
review. The best laid plans are often
foiled by a four year old and after one comic shop it was time to head
home. The one book that I was really
excited for was the Archaia Entertainment anthology. Yes, it was a great package (who can beat a
hardcover anthology for free), but it could have easily been a huge
disappointment if the content did not hold up.
Luckily, for the most part the content lived up to and even exceeded
expectations.
I have recently abandoned all contact with the “big 2” comic
publishers in terms of purchasing their content. Much of that has to do with the quality of
the content provided, but price points are also a major factor. I cannot, in good conscience, pay $4-$5 for a
comic book that contains very little in the way of a cohesive story (I’m
looking at you Bendis). The recent legal
and moral turmoil at the companies also have pushed me toward more
non-traditional purchases, and I have yet to be extremely disappointed, as I
often was with the standard superhero dreck.
This brings me to Mouse
Guard by David Peterson. I am all
for anthropomorphized animal heroes (I miss you Captain Carrot) and will
generally give those kinds of books at least a chance, as long as the art is
good and the stories do not pander to the lowest common denominator. If you have not picked up Mouse Guard yet, you owe it to yourself
if you enjoy a quality read with purely beautiful artwork. It can be a little slow at times in terms of
its progression, but the lack of dialogue or exposition is filled with some of
the best artwork I have ever seen in a comic book. I can only imagine how the pitch meeting went
when David Peterson met with Archaia for the first time. When someone says they want to do something
with anthropomorphized mice, my first thought is Fievel Mousekowitz. You know, An
American Tale. I don’t know if I
could sit through an entire book in that style regardless of the quality of the
writing (which in and of itself is solid).
What we get instead is mice that look more realistic than any
anthropomorphization of the animal I
have ever seen. Peterson takes the world
that they live in and makes it feel like it could be right outside your door,
like if you are not careful you could step on one of the Mouse Guard patrolling
on the fringes of their land. This is
incredibly important, in my opinion, when it comes to “funny animal comics” as
they used to be called. By having
something grounded in reality, something that us mere humans can hold on to, I
believe that makes the story more readily accessible to the masses. If they see something in the stories that
they can recognize, it just makes it work that much more.
The Mouse Guard
offering in the anthology answers the call beautifully by telling a great
one-shot story with art that is just beautiful.
The entire story is a play done with Marionettes. This means that David Peterson has not only
to add in strings for each of the puppet characters without detracting from the
flow of the story, all of the joints of the various characters have to be
fleshed out as if they were individual pieces that are held together by wire/string/etc.
(you know, like a puppet). Peterson
pulls this off masterfully, and the Mouse
Guard offering in this anthology would be enough to justify an actual price
tag, but makes it so much sweeter because it was free. Greatness isn’t usually dropped in your lap,
but in this case it most certainly was.
It is so hard to follow something like Mouse Guard in an anthology because not only would many people pick
up the book for that reason alone (slowly raises hand) but those individuals
may expect a similar artistic quality throughout the rest of the
anthology. Have no fear. The next story will not let you down. Hoggle and the Worm, a Labyrinth story by the team of Ted
Naifeh, Adrienne Ambrose, Cory Godbey and Deron Bennett provides a clever story
with a nice twist of an ending. That’s
right, yet another story that is complete and leaves me feeling content with a
beginning, middle, and end. While the
coloring is a bit muddy and tends to mix in with what appears to be digitally
darkened pencils, the art has a certain cartooniness to it that I really
enjoyed.
Steps of the Dapper
Men was next by the team of Jim McCann, Janet K. Lee and Dave
Lanphear. While the art is very nice,
the story feels like it is just trying way too hard to be way too smart. The art definitely has the feel of a brightly
colored Tim Burton movie, but can seem flat at times which does not help the
fact that the story falls flat as well.
This may be a better story in a stand alone comic book/graphic novel
where it has the space to flesh out the story and provide that
beginning-middle-end that is important.
As it is, it feels like we are thrown into a situation and instead of
learning what is going on we are hit with words, just more and more words until
the sweet release of the final page.
Where Steps of the
Dapper Men fail with their overuse of nonsensical dialogue, Royden Lepp’s Rust excels with its minimalist
approach. The tone of the artwork, both
in the coloring and the simplicity of the linework works so well with not only
what the story is trying to say, but also with transporting the reader to a
little rural farm in middle America during
wartime. It created a sense of nostalgia
that is not easy to do in someone that wasn’t even alive for the Vietnam
war. I felt like a child sitting next to
Oswald while he wrote his letter to his soldier father. While Mouse
Guard blew me away with the quality of the art, Rust was an
experience. My only hope is that Lepp
can continue to invoke that nostalgia in a longer feature. If he can do so then he will have a huge hit
on his hands.
Cursed Pirate Girl
by Jeremy Bastian was the first big “What is this crap?” moment I had when
reading the anthology. The story was
bad, just plain bad. While I realize
that the whole point was that the story was incoherent ramblings from an old
man, if I really wanted that I would go down to the nursing home and listen in
on some of the conversations there. If I
am (theoretically) going to purchase something for entertainment purposes I
want to be entertained, and in this instance I was not even remotely
entertained. The art was decent, and I
love detailed artwork, but the fact that everything was rendered in such
painstaking detail also created the problem of complete muddiness throughout
the pages. It may have improved with the
addition of color, but it would also be difficult to color pages that are that
detailed so it would probably have made the artwork even more confusing and
unreadable than it is now. While this
does not ruin the anthology by any means, it does not stand up to anything else
in the collection.
The final offering was Cow
Boy by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos.
This is how you end an anthology.
It is a complete story that even gives a brief synopsis of the main
character before getting into the story portion. I have always liked Eliopoulos’s art and this
is no different, though I think his simple linework and character design (think
Peanuts) is more fittingly colored
with an old-school flat coloring technique instead of the more modern,
painterly effect used here. The coloring
does not detract from the art though, it is just not the perfect
complement. The story was fun and
something that I could see picking up an entire trade of, which is really the
whole point of adding a story to an anthology.
In summary, the anthology as a whole was very good, despite
bits of nonsense here and there. It
gives me a lot of hope for Archaia moving forward and I will definitely be
checking out their offerings more frequently now that I know they are unafraid
of taking a risk which seems to be fairly rare in this day and age of recycled
superhero plots. A comic company like
Archaia deserves not only the patronage of the general comic book lovers, but
also the chance to grow to challenge the “big boys” of the industry with their
combination of quality art and new ideas.
